All aboard the Obama bandwagon

Blogpost by Justin - 6 November, 2008 at 17:00

When you’ve just been elected president of the United States, it pays to hire a big bandwagon. You know for a fact that just about everyone’s going to want to climb aboard and it’s going to get mighty crowded.

Quick to jump on was the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear energy industry’s policy organization (that is, chief cheerleader and propagandist). In a statement on the face of it congratulating Barack Obama for his victory, NEI president and chief executive officer, Frank L. (Skip) Bowman cuts to the chase pretty quickly:

The nuclear energy industry congratulates Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden on their election. One of the most important and compelling challenges facing their administration is to put in place a national energy policy to achieve energy security and to protect the U.S. economy and the environment.

The rest of the statement is pretty standard and predictable nuclear industry boilerplate: ‘reliable’, ‘affordable’, ‘the only large-scale source of carbon-free electricity’, ‘creating thousands of green jobs’, ‘scientifically sound’, ‘can raise the dead and cure the sick’. We only made the last one up. The rest is Frank’s fiction.

There is every sign that Bowman and his friends will be welcomed aboard the Obama bandwagon with all the trouble that threatens. They should be pushed off before they fall.